Why can’t they EN-UN-CIATE!? or Lower the volume, turn up the subtitles

More and more these days, I understand less and less of what the people on television or radio are saying. It’s not that I cannot hear them. I hear the noise of their speech, but I cannot necessarily make out the words. I find myself railing at them, as if I were an old crone elocution teacher: Speak slowly — or maybe not slowly, but for goodness sake EN-UN-CIATE!

I am not talking about accents here. I am talking about make the effort to pronounce the words to ensure that the listener can discern them and, thus, make out the meaning of what you’re saying. It is so frustrating to me that so many broadcasters and podcasters think that having a microphone is enough to transmit their message to me. No. They also need to speak clearly and make the effort, take the time, to translate the noise of their words into meaning for my ears via that microphone.

I recently learned that it’s not just me.

This 10-minute video on Vox’s YouTube channel explains that the problem of hard-to-hear on-air voices is, at least in part, due to changes in technology. Microphones used to be big, but these days they are small and even tiny (think about what’s in your cell phone), thus compressing what comes out of them. A movie that is made for big theatres with surround-sound records that sound onto as many as 128 channels; however, when we watch that same movie on our TV, laptop, tablet or phone, all that amazing sound is compressed into many, many fewer channels.

So, the problem I am hearing at my end of things comes from a combination of tiny speakers, mumbling by the actors or presenters, a penchant for very loud loud noises and dialogue that must contrast with that loudness (so it cannot be artificially made louder to help me hear it because then there would be less contrast with the loudness of the loud noises), and a flattened mix (fewer channels). While the result ends up in my ears, it is not, actually, my ears that are the problem.

The solution, says Vox, is three-fold, including “just keep the subtitles on.”

Ha! A good solution for watching on a screen, but a hopeless suggestion for listening to the radio, of course. And I’m sad about that because radio is my favourite medium of all. I listen to it for news and current affairs and also for popular culture; in fact, without radio I would have no clue at all about popular culture. 

However, CBC’s newest show on Radio One, Commotion, with host Elamin Abdelmahmoud leaves me, more often than not, still in the dark about the latest trend or celebrity. Too often, I simply cannot understand what he or his guests are saying. I enjoyed him on the At Issue politics panel on CBC’s The National on TV, but politics is a sport I know a lot about; I could fill in the gaps when I couldn’t understand the specific words being said by him or someone else. But popular culture is a bit of a mystery to me these days, so when names are spoken or trends are described, it is like a foreign language that I need decoding through careful enunciation and smart analysis. The other day, I switched it off because I was no wiser for hearing it, but a whole lot more frustrated. (I have the same issue with Tom Power of Q and too many of my local CBC Radio on-air names these days.)

Even a little enunciation would go a long way; either that, or someone invent subtitles for the radio, please.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash